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MOVIE REVIEW
Transporter, The
(2002) Starring:
Jason Statham, Matt Schulze, Shu Qi
Director:
Cory Yuen
Rating: R
Studio:
20th Century Fox
Review
Posted: 10.14.02
Spoilers:
Minor
By
Harvey S. Karten
Scripter Luc Besson must have seen
the handwriting on the wall some time ago. The Parisian-born
director, screenwriter and producer got a hot tip that the
French people prefer Hollywood pics to the usual non-stop talky
Gallic gems, so he told the croissant-munchers what they wanted
to hear. His best work, "La femme Nikita," is the slick tale of
a pleasure-seeking young woman who chills with a punk-style gang
but turns tail when French intelligence makes her an offer she
couldn't resist. If you saw John Badham's "Point of No Return"
as well, you traced how the Americans ruined a perfectly good
actioner with unemotional acting.
This time, however, Besson is
merely a co-screenwriter in a movie that's not going down in
history for clever dialogue but is a genuine crowd pleaser for
its non-stop action and its cool, James Bond-ish hero-villain.
You could compare Cory Yuen's "The Transporter" with "La Femme
Nikita," both dealing with people who do evil things but come
around to do the right thing through no fault of their own.
The titled transporter, Jason
Statham in the role of Frank Martin, is going places, not only
in moving from locale to picturesque locale on most types of
transportation but in his future with the all- American favorite
genre of action-adventure. Statham is running on Diesel fuel
from the time he enters the picture to the moment he makes
France safe for escargot. As a transporter who zips about town
pretty quickly, he's something like New York cab drivers, with
the one exception that he knows where he's headed. Give him an
address in Nice or Marseilles or Grenoble and he'll take your
package there. He'll even carry people as he does in the
adrenalin-pumping opening scene as driver of a getaway car for
some awfully stupid-looking masked bandits (they look like the
guys in the Coke ad who surrender to the cops in return for a
sip of the beverage). Liking simplicity, he doesn't much go for
the complexity of carrying a live package, however, a duffel bag
that turns out to bear a sexy Chinese woman, Lai (Shu Qi), who
makes an honest man out of him as women tend to do.
The picture is all Statham's.
Borrowing from Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," Cory
Yuen ("Lethal Weapon 4") directs Statham who heretofore appeared
in more offbeat roles in Guy Ritchie's enigmatic "Lock, Stock
and Two Smoking Barrels" and in Ritchie's near-incomprehensible
"Snatch." The transporter not only drives BMW's and Mercedes,
but is at ease hijacking a private plane, swimming in the deep,
and dodging Uzi-style bullets and even bazooka shells, his
desire to live fueled by Shu Qi's character Lai. Lai's wicked
father, Mr Kwai (Ric Young), working with the smirking villain,
Wall Street (Matt Schulze), is smuggling Chinese people into the
Cote d'Azur for purposes other than playing the casinos.
Francois Berleand turns up now and then with a two-day growth as
Inspector Tarconi, who also has a hand in making Frank Martin
see the evil of his ways.
Rating: 3 out of 4
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